MANILA, Sept. 5, 2012—The reported increasing suicide incidence among young Filipinos, particularly in the age group 5 to 14 and 15 to 24, manifests the youth’s lowering threshold for stress and weakened coping mechanism.
Since the age group prone to suicide belongs to the school-going age group, the leadership of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP) has called on school administrators and guidance counselors to pay particular attention to suicide prone students.
Re-elected CEAP president Fr. Gregg Bañaga, C.M. said their organization is not aware of the National Statistics Office report that revealed increasing suicide rate among Filipinos, majority of the cases involving young people aged 24 and below, for the past 21 years.
But Bañaga confirmed that students nowadays are “more prone to disappointment, have low coping mechanism to stress and negativity, need a lot of motivation, and want to accomplish or obtain things easy.”
In an interview with YouthPinoy, Bañaga called on administrators of CEAP member-schools to “alert the guidance counselor to device ways to detect students that are stressed out” and have suicide tendencies.
Since very few registered guidance counselors are attending to hundreds of students in a certain academic community, Bañaga said school directors, who are usually priests or nuns, can use their background in psychology to provide counseling to problematic students.
Based on NSO records, the suicide rate from 1984 to 2005 went up from 0.46 to seven out of every 200,000 men. On the other hand, it jumped from 0.24 to two for every 200,000 women.
It was Dr. Dinah Nadera, a psychiatrist and an associate professor of the University of the Philippines’ Open University, who disclosed that an increasing trend of suicide was noted [especially] among the youth, particularly in the age group 5 to 14 and 15 to 24.
Meanwhile, a separate study of around 300 cases collected from the records of hospitals and the police in 2008 and 2009 also revealed that the majority of suicides were carried out at home during summer, particularly during the Lenten season when Catholics observe fasting, prayer and penitence.
The study also showed that the “leading methods” employed in committing suicide are hanging, strangulation and suffocation.
Nadera said not all cases were due to depression. She said other factors could lead to a person’s decision to end one’s life, such as low income and unemployment, medical conditions, and marital status. (YouthPinoy)
Read more at http://youthpinoy.com/school-admins-urged-to-detect-attend-to-students-with-suicidal-tendencies/
